Soon after being selected by the Japanese government in 1936 as a committee member to compose Kokutai no Hongi (Cardinal Principles of the National Entity of Japan) and publicly declaring Japan's manifest destiny as hakkō ichiu—eight corners of the world under one Japanese roof—Kuroita Katsumi (1874–1946) suffered a stroke from which he never fully recovered. Students and colleagues took over projects he was then working on, such as the sixth centennial of the death of Emperor Go Daigo in 1939, the twenty-sixth centennial of the founding of Japan in 1940, and the completion of the reconstruction of the Imperial Household Museum in 1938. In 1964, nearly two decades after his death, his massive, multi-volume Shintei Zōho Kokushi Taikei (Anthology of Japanese History) was finally completed. With both scholarly rigor and inexhaustible energy, Kuroita publicly promoted and used history to support Japan's modernization and the legitimation of its imperial policies.

Making History Matter, Lisa Yoshikawa's exhaustively researched and detailed monograph, explores how Kuroita, with some of his colleagues and students at Japan's most prestigious university, Tokyo Imperial University, or Tōdai (known as the University of Tokyo since 1947), transformed the scholarship of Japanese history. Through their influence, Japanese history became a major area of academic study—an area of public knowledge and appreciation, as well as intellectual support for imperial policy.

Raised in Hasami, part of Omura domain on Kyushu island, Kuroita was proud of his home region's support for the restoration of the imperial government during the final years of the Tokugawa shogunate. He entered Daigo Kōtō Chugakkō (commonly known as Gokō), a new school for elites that prepared students for Tōdai and other imperial universities just when the Meiji government was emphasizing imperial loyalty and nationalism. Kuroita was a student at Gokō when Lafcadio Hearn was one of its instructors, and Kuroita later recalled his former teacher with fondness.

Schooled in Leopold von Ranke's methodology of researching and analyzing documents as the basis of historical interpretation while Ito Hirobumi and other Meiji leaders were adapting Otto von Bismarck's German nationalization policies to Japan, Kuroita and most of his Tōdai colleagues supported the Meiji government by searching for and publishing information on historical documents and artifacts supporting the legitimacy of the imperial state. This academic support also buttressed the Japanese government's increasing colonial designs and policies on Asia. In other words, Kuroita used his interpretations of the past—often the distant past—to inspire nationalism and support for Japan's imperial policies of the present. Whether it was the elevation and popularization of Shotoku Taishi of the early seventh century, the Northern Court–Southern controversy of the fourteenth century, or even the Age of the Gods, Kuroita managed to interpret Japanese history in ways that inspired patriotic and moral support for Japan.

Yet, as Yoshikawa painstakingly demonstrates throughout Making History Matter, Kuroita was not a narrow-minded lackey or a boisterous ultra-nationalist; he was a serious, multidisciplinary scholar who used Japan's history to support the imperial state, both publicly and academically. He traveled all over Japan and Asia to locate documents and artifacts for his writing and public history projects, such as his work with museums and speeches to local and national organizations. He and his colleagues were on a self-appointed mission of making history matter.

Kuroita was ideologically opposed to the liberal tendencies of those inspired by Jean- Jacques Rousseau, John Locke, and the openness of the so-called Taisho Democracy era. While he sometimes assisted his students or close colleagues who supported socialism or communism, Kuroita was certainly not a proponent of academic freedom. For example, when Tōdai law professor Minobe Tatsukichi was forced to recant his view of the “emperor as organ of the state” and forced to resign his seat in the House of Peers, Kuroita disdainfully commented that “the issue should have been dealt with much earlier” (p. 248).

Making History Matter is an exhaustively researched and detailed study of Kuroita Katsumi and the growth of Japanese history as an academic field, as a field of public discourse, and as a supporter of the imperial Japanese state. For some readers, this work might be too exhaustive; Yoshikawa seemingly discusses and quotes Kuroita on all manner of historical, archeological, linguistic, and political subjects, including discussions from Kuroita's colleagues and students. This presents a substantial and nuanced view of Kuroita as a historian, but the sheer effort required to carefully read and comprehend this work may be too much, even for some historians of Japan. Curiously, despite this biography's nonstop discussions of Kuroita's voluminous works, both minor and major, it includes very little of Kuroita's personal life. Indeed, there is almost nothing at all about his personal and family life after chapter 1, except for a short paragraph on page 218 mentioning that four of his eight daughters and his brother died in the 1930s. While this lack of personal information was likely a deliberate decision by the author (or editor?) to concentrate almost exclusively on Kuroita's life as a historian, it turns Kuroita into a one-dimensional character—which was surely not the case for a man with so many talents and so much energy.

Yoshikawa spent many years researching, translating, and writing this detailed biography of Kuroita, who was at the forefront of making history matter in Japan. Hundreds of his written and edited works are still available at research libraries around the world and are still cited by scholars as authoritative sources despite ideological and interpretive changes since his death more than seventy years ago. In the first few pages of Making History Matter, Yoshikawa compares Kuroita's influence to that of Frederick Jackson Turner and Charles A. Beard, and even to von Ranke himself. By the end of the book, this reader was completely persuaded of the validity of the comparison.